Strep Butt

My vacation post is in progress, but requires time to load pictures so in the meantime, I give you: strep butt.

Now, strep butt is much less glamorous than it sounds, but in the interest of educating my readership, I feel compelled to share our experience.

About a month ago, Alexander did no small amount of scratching at his heiney and a couple times howled and scooted on the floor to scratch an inaccessible itch inside his diaper. I wondered aloud if it's possible for a 2-year old to have hemmoroids hemmorhoids hemmeroids hemerhoids CRAP! How the heck do you spell it?! A quick trip to Microsoft Word spell checker and I give you: hemorrhoids (I was so close!) as that was the only thing I could think of that would make someone so uncomfortable and scratch until drawing blood if given even the smallest window of opportunity. After one of the more agitated sessions, I called the nurse's hot line and was told it could be one of two things. She started with the most pleasant: pinworms. Ugh. I read about those suckers years ago when Kathryn was experiencing similar symptoms, but thankfully, that wasn't the problem then and we dodged that bullet again this time. After explaining that hemorrhoids was very unlikely at this age, she said the second possibility was strep butt. Strep what?! Yeah, I heard her correctly. Apparently, when one has strep throat and one puts ones hand in ones mouth and one proceeds to touch said hand to ones anus, the strep bacteria can be transferred from mouth to anus causing, you got it: strep butt. This seemed the more likely of the two options given Alexander's recent respiratory issues so we scheduled an appointment for that day. I proceeded to look up "strep butt" on babycenter.com, incidentally, my favorite parenting website, but only found references to the throat variety. When I mentioned that to the doctor, she smiled and told me the official, albeit less amusing, name is peri-rectal strep.

So, there you go. Seven years of parenting with nary an incident of this sort. You learn something new every day, I guess. And, for those of you concerned about Alexander's rectal health, after ten days of antibiotics his heiney was as good as new.